I haven’t thought once about how he is; he seems completely himself. Perhaps that’s my fault. How can he grieve when he is looking after me?
‘But I’m worried about you missing so much school.’
Until this moment, Wyatt seemed faraway and distant, I hadn’t put together it might be here, now. Desperation electrifies language; where I’d managed before only single words, fragments, I am jolted into whole sentences. My voice is a hoarse, broken thing. ‘I’ll catch up. I promise.’
He blinks, surprised at my reaction. ‘Of course you will. I have no doubt you’ll get up to speed. I just wonder if it’s better to be back at school, around people your own age—’
‘I’m better with you.’
‘I’m worried—’
‘Please.’
His resolve falters, my need for him loosens it. I cannot abide parks, butterflies, drawing being replaced by the clamour of Wyatt, all its bright new faces.
‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’ll write to the school, tell them you need more time. You can come to Cornwall. As long as you don’t mind.’
How could I mind? There’s no one else I’d rather be with.
From: Kit McDermott
09:32
I’m really freaking out here, Laurie, I don’t know what’s going on. Why the hell are you on antidepressants?
I get it if you got them a few weeks ago, we lost a child, we’re both grieving. But there are prescriptions here from six years ago. Which makes no sense. That’s before Millie. Before we were even married.
I’m going insane. I’m properly going insane.
19
Producer
Now
Iknow the exact date the seed took root. It was Friday 20 October 2017, eight years ago. Project Mozart had just ended, it was the third failing European bank I’d helped carve up and sell off and although the deal had been signed the night before, my body didn’t believe it was over. The adrenaline of the past eight months was impossible to switch off, it trilled through me, making me jump at the ping of someone else’s phone, their ringtone.
It was lunch time, I’d bought a turkey wrap, I stared at the brown paper bag and it struck me that this was the first time in months when I could eat without my emails open, without Bruce flying into my office to discuss the letter from the European Central Bank or an impromptu meeting with Finance. Tentatively, I minimised my inbox, reached for my sandwich and opened BBC News to a story breaking across America.
The women I recognised instantly, they were the faces of my childhood. The youngest sister in the TV series about three sister witches – I watched it on Saturday nights when Daniel andMama were on their dates, wishing I had a sister witch to battle demons and monsters. The lead actress in the movie I watched in the common room with Lisa and Jennie a year after Mama died. Beautiful, beautiful women, they were stars, Mama wanted to be them, we all wanted to be them.
I didn’t recognise the name of the movie producer, but it was clear from the way he held himself that he was a Hollywood mogul. He wasn’t remarkable in any way – small eyes, greying stubble, a layer of fat under his chin – if he was dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, you’d pass him on the street without a second glance. But he was never photographed in plaid. Always in an expensive black suit, a bow tie at his throat, flashing an LA-white smile.
I pored over hundreds of images of him after I read the article. I watched his hands. Mama always said it’s our hands that give us away. She showed me hers, how the fingertips of her left were hardened from decades pressed against the strings, the soft indent on her right from holding her bow, she would unfurl mine, pointing out streaks of chlorophyll. ‘The violinist and the botanist,’ she’d laughed.
In a few photos, the brute fleshiness of his paw was visible as he waved to fans on the red carpet or halted the intrusion of a camera lens when he was talking to the First Lady. But by far, the majority of stills pictured him pulling a starlet close, half his age, four fingers flat under the line of a bodice, thumb on bare skin, and then I blinked stupidly at my reflection in the glass wall of my office – my nude heels, silk shirt, the lip gloss winking on my lips, my mind seemed to take it all in as it crashed towards something immense and unnameable.
Half his age.
Thumb on bare skin.
I threw up in the wastepaper bin.
It consumed me, the scandal. My browser became a library of refreshed news tabs, I couldn’t go anywhere without my headphones, losing myself in interviews from actresses and American daytime TV hosts, cursing whenever I lost signal between train stations, pulling an earphone discreetly out of my ear whenever Bruce looked like he was reaching for the handle of my office door. When one of Mama’s favourite actresses was interviewed, I locked myself in the toilets, my throat constricting as she described the floor plan of the hotel room freezing in her mind, how he’d badgered her over and over again to go further, the oral she promised to get out. Afterwards, the words she said about why she’d spoken out now circled in my head, a constant loop, a washing cycle with no end: ‘This is the moment.’
For what?
‘Are you all right?’ Kit asked one evening, sliding under the duvet.